Here's more evidence that Facebook is building its own Siri-like voice assistant

Facebook appears to be quietly building its own voice assistant
to compete with Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa.

An unreleased voice search feature was recently uncovered in code
from a past version of Facebook's mobile app by developer Blake
Tsuzaki, who shared his findings with Business Insider.

The code, which was uncovered by Tsuzaki and first surfaced by
The Next Web's Matt Navarra on Twitter last
week, shows what is evidently an unreleased voice assistant
capable of making suggestions and finding basic information like
the score of a sports game.

The voice assistant was first spotted in a September version of
Facebook's mobile app, Tsuzaki told BI. "It’s non-functional
right now (listens, and then errors out), but I’m finding a way
to get it to do a bit more," he said via email.

A Facebook spokesperson told BI that the voice assistant was not
an active feature or user-facing test in the company's app and
declined to comment further. Facebook often tests new features
it's working on with a small percentage of users in the wild
before making them more widely available.

The company signaled earlier this year that it wasn't working on
a voice assistant when Messenger chief David Marcus
told Variety, "We are not working on that actively right
now."

But people familiar with the matter recently told BI that
Facebook is, in fact, working on a voice assistant within
Building 8, its mysterious consumer hardware division that was
just recently formed. Facebook's assistant is intended to power
the company's
forthcoming video chat device for the home codenamed Aloha,
the people said.

Aloha is scheduled to make its official debut in May 2018 and
compete with the$229
Amazon Echo Show, which was released in June.